Last Friday, four men were convicted in the killing of a prominent adviser to Myanmar’s leadership who was shot in the head while holding his infant grandson at Yangon International Airport in 2017.
The killing of U Ko Ni, who was the adviser, is widely believed to have been a political assassination, but the supposed mastermind of the murder has yet to be found, and what role, if any, the country’s powerful military had in the killing has yet to be revealed after the lengthy trial of the four suspects.
Prior to his death, Mr. Ko Ni is known to had advocated a new constitution that would cut the special powers the military reserved for itself in the current charter. Mr. Ko Ni was also an author of a strategy that allowed Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi to bypass a restriction in the Constitution that prevented her from becoming president. Two of the suspects in the murder case to given death sentences for the murder and the directing of the killer and the other two were given 5 and 3 year sentences for conspiring and harboring one of the conspirators as a fugitive.
In my opinion, all of the suspects besides the man who harbored the conspirator should be given the death sentence, as all of them were well involved in the murder. In addition, I feel that they should not only be given the sentence, but they should be tried for death penalty as well as they murdered a very successful lawyer and someone who had done many good things for the nation of Myanmar. The mastermind is know to be U Aung Win Khaing, a former lieutenant colonel in Myanmar’s Army and still remains at large as he has yet to be found.